A number of payment methods and systems exist. For example, prepaid cards, such as prepaid or preauthorized debit cards, can be a convenient method for consumers to conduct transactions, such as payment transactions. Such prepaid cards can include a memory that stores a balance, and any purchases using the card can be deducted from the balance. Prepaid cards have advantages in that the funds (or more precisely data representing funds) are stored directly on the card, so that a merchant will not always need to communicate with a bank to determine if the consumer has enough money for the transaction. The card can use a counter to keep track of how much has been spent, until the funds on the card reach zero (i.e., all the money has been spent). A “counter” is a record of the amount of money spent using the prepaid card. Often times, extra funds can be added to a card. If this happens, the counter can be reset to zero dollars upon reloading of the prepaid card with value, so that the card will appear to not have spent any of its stored funds.
Since prepaid cards can maintain the balance directly on the card, such cards can be used to make purchases without having to communicate with an associated bank or other financial institution, as in the case of a credit card. This can speed up transactions and save costs. However, the financial institution necessarily must relinquish a degree of control over such offline transactions. Multiple transactions (i.e., 2 or more) can be conducted with a prepaid card before the financial institution is aware of the transaction.
There can often be an exception during a transaction. An exception is any of a number of scenarios in which a transaction has an error. For example, funds may be deducted from the portable consumer device during an attempted transaction, but the POS device or financial institution system does not receive a record of the deduction. Thus, the information in the financial institution system does not match the information in the portable consumer device. Such exception scenarios may be familiar to any consumer who has dealt with broken cash registers, temporarily disabled communication networks, etc. During offline transactions, the financial institution may not get the opportunity to use fraud detection measures. Multiple exceptions may occur before a financial institution determines that a portable consumer device contains incorrect data, by which point it may be difficult to unravel where the problems occurred or the amount of funds affected.
Embodiments of the invention address the above-noted problems, and other problems, individually and collectively.